June 16, 2012

Making noise and having fun..

The Good Lance Corporal stumbled onto something interesting the other day and I must admit I am smitten. There is a segment of the shooting population that enjoys what they call Black Powder Shooting. These are the old muzzle-loading firearms antiques and replicas of same harkening us back to the gentler(?) age of the Wild West or Revolutionary War days.

He discovered that one can own a replica of a Samuel Colt .44 revolver (shown below) for surprisingly little money and apparently little or no interaction with the buzz-kill federal and state regulations. (Caveat: your mileage may vary.) In any event, I walked into my office one morning this week and this beautiful replica of the Colt 1860 .44 Army revolver on my desk. (He had gotten in from work late and put it there for me to see when I got up early in the morning.) It is a beautiful, graceful piece of machinery:

Pietta Colt 1860 .44 Caliber Army Revolver

And I was dumbfounded when he told me that these were available as inexpensively as they were and without the registration regulations required of normal pistols.

The operation of these is somewhat quaint, you do not just jam in another clip and wail away. (You can, however, do what they did back in the day: carry around pre-loaded cylinders.) Here is a video on the care and feeding of these beautiful pieces.

Anyway, I hope we can get out to the range and bang off a few rounds to see how it shoots. Hell, I might even pick up one for myself, and a holster and a hat and a serape.